Read This Line And Then Get On With Your Life: The best thing I can say about the new 100 from Flea is that, these days, it’s a far better thing to be ahead of Sunny than behind.

Scott went from N/A? (or was he on? I don’t care enough to check!) to 44, which, no offense to Scott, shows how random and meaningless most of the ratings everything from like 25 on down. These people’s work have value, but you’re comparing really tiny apples to really tiny apples. Order them any way you want, they’re still tiny apples in the scheme of things. There are maybe 15 people (and that’s pushing it) on the list who matter to the 2% of readers who really mean anything in the grand scheme of things; the rest are here just to entertain ourselves and each other, but there’s no real impact to what they say. It’s nice, but it don’t mean a thing.

(“Spoken like a guy who’s been doing this for six years and knows what they meant?” “Spoken like a guy who’s occasionally bordeline insane with jealousy over baseball web fandom”)

Wait, wait, let me obscure that comments with a cheap shots so I don’t have to actually intelluctally debate that on any level: Hey, 4 411 guys in the top 11, in a thing written by a 411 guy. Wow. GUTSY

I think that’s better than last time anyway?

Not that I care either way: if the whole inspiration for 411 to add blogs to their site is because Mr. Keith wanted to do a blog…why isn’t Scott blog on 411 now?

Did someone not give Flea the link the Punk’s blog?

Since I have Flea reading this: When you said “the WMXIX match wasn’t as good because Angle didn’t want to mat wrestle”, you really should’ve said “the Iron Man wasn’t as good because Angle didn’t want to mat wrestle.”

Did I ever actually say my “When you’re doing long matches, why don’t you try to sell the commerical time for long matches soccer-style, with ad graphics during the match to avoid commericals?” or did I just keep talking about it to myself? Back in the day, they used to shrink down the action to a little box and just run the commericals in smaller box than usual, and if you timed it right with rest holds, that could work too. The problem probably comes down to a “This segment of the match is being brought to you by-” “A kick to the groin! That’ll leave a mark!” “Subway.”

I always say too much when I’m going on 2 hours of sleep.

Although I have a feeling comments will be added later, I was glad not to see something like “Best lucha recapper” attached to my name. People would’ve died if that happened, again. (If nothing else, the last few weeks has proved that’s not a correct line.)

For lines that aren’t as cheap but perhaps as pointless, feel free to check my AWARDS on OO – writing anything column like stresses me to heck, and I believe I was up to my fourth different deadline by the time I sent it in. What I’m looking forward most to is not getting any feedback, thus validating my urge not to write anything long and/or focused for another six months. WOO HOO

Rick’s nice for putting up with me. You’re nice for putting up with me.

I think in a parallel universe, I may get some CMLL done tommorow. I’ll at least update that page.

So, I kinda took the weekend or whatever this was off from doing anything of value (ie: I still recaped the lack of ideas Velocity and Heat were) and now it’ 3:30 and I’m working on OO’s Awards which I should’ve done – Thursday? Eh.

Kids, never agree to write column like things if you’ve got a overwhelming aversion/dearly fear of writing column like things on the account of your deadly ability to suck and take forever at doing it.

Also, I don’t think I could be using pointless flowery statements and the word “awesome” any more. Also, I’m only done with – what, the first six? ARGH.

I think I’ll just see if I can finish this tommorow. Or die trying. Or just die.

Hey, fuzzy dice.

(Scott’s ’03 Rumble recap is up. So is Homer’s stuff – I forgot to add the last thing because I’m not very good at it. CMLL stuff later this week.)

12:19:22 AM Greg says:
For reference, my employee number is [omitted], should you wish to make note of it. Have you contacted support about this issue before?

12:20:15 AM ME!:
Yes. This is my fifth time talking to someone about some aspect of it, the last time about 30 minutes ago when I was asked to run a program and report back. My support number is 2-1274596594

12:20:54 AM Greg says:
Meanwhile, I’m going to give you a Service Request number to write down. I’ll be documenting everything we’ve done today under this Service Request number. If you need to reach us again for any reason related to this issue, please refer to this number so the next technician will use it to see the history of what we’ve done. The number is: 2-1274596594.

That’d be perversely amusing if that wasn’t the second time I had the same exchange in 4 days.

The great thing is after a week of this, they’re FINALLY actually asking to look at it themselves.

The not so great thing is that they’re charging me for a box to ship it to them in (and shipping and handling and insurance.) And that box is costing me $44! FOURTY FOUR DOLLARS FOR A BOX! A BOX! A BOX ON ALL OF YOU

That box better not be cardboard with foam inside when it gets here. It ought to be a box made of a really good steel or lunch meat.

Oh wait, this is even better: they asked if they could format my hard drive if it comes to it.

The hard drive they just sent me. Blank. That’s not working. Which is why I’m talking to them in the first place.

My big plan was to include links to recaps on other a variety of sites (or at the very least Shaprio’s Heat stuff and I guess maybe some RAW stuff) but my interest in this wanes near randomly. I’ll probably go back and add colors or something.

While doing the inital links for SD!/Velocity/Heat was easy (just something I cooked up with Cut and Paste in Excel when really bored), adding more isn’t nearly as fun and outside of the obvious omissions of 50 or so RAWs (wait, did I do some of those? Hmmm), the work to do find/add other links isn’t worth the benefit it’d provide.

(AKA: If no besides me is going to use this, and I don’t think I’m going need the other links, why do ’em? Right.)

Hey Scott, James, Joe, whoever: Anyone want to go back and do the ’03 Rumble? It’s the only show no one did, unless I forgot about something.

When tOA’s history section goes and dies on you, you’ve gotta do something, I guess.

I should plug thesmartmarks.com for being a resource for some of this data. I completely endorse them as a place to find match times. In the future, I think I can manage the 15 minutes to time/finish things myself, but it was a lot easier than digging through tapes I didn’t have much desire to look through; mostly, the data is more useful as info to use in the title histories (Cruiser, SD! Tag and US Title updated (tag will be added to the side bar soon) – I may have time tommorow to look at how much work doing the SD! part of the WWE title, but I dunno if I want to do it.)

I may update the Cruiser ladder or the info pages or catching up on CMLL, but I hope to get my new hard drive in and I impluse bought a copy of Final Fantasy…IX (swerve) and I could just play that instead of doing stuff here. Eh.

Q: If you lost your hard drive right now, how much would you pay to salvage it, not knowing how much you’d get back?

A good portion of the stuff on that hard drive I spent the most time on this site is on this website. A lot of the rest of the stuff is either still avalible on my old computer (I only stopped using this in August) or stuff I got from Kazaa/BT or I could get from Kazaa/BT. That’s probably actually most of the GBs – I never got around to talking about my strange fascination with making Winter reading material out of reading every single X-Men comic ever* despite having read like 3 previously – so it’s not like I lost huge bytes of personal stuff.

But STILL. E-mails. Job stuff. Personal stuff. A Sim City or two. MY STUFF. I want it back.

Or at least I did till I was quoted $500 to fix (-$50 for being a Gateway customer.) You are not missing a decimal point up there.

So there I am. If I had this computer for 4 years+ with no back up, like the one I’m typing on right now, this is a no question – don’t spend money on other junk for a while and see what they can do. If it was 2 years, probably still.

But $450? For something that wasn’t too far from a new car smell? Compared to what else I could do with that money? Eh.

I’ve lost hard drives before and moved on with my life without getting anything back. It always does suck. I’m thinking that’s what I may end up doing here, unless they suddenly decide to give me a 80% discount or something. It’s not easy to put a price on stuff like that, but I’d say more in the $100 range.

I have this lingering feeling that – despite it giving every sign of a hard drive failure – it may not really be the problem here. I’ll find out in a day or three.

I also do know that most sane people would have just said “$450? Get real. Moving on now.”

Hope they’ve actually put an OS and the Microsoft stuff I had on the comptuer before, or it’s gonna be a long slow annoying rebuild.

* (remind me to digress about this later when I shouldn’t already be deep asleep.